Fossil

Project Documentation

Fossil provides a built-in wiki
that can be used to store the
documentation for a project. This is sufficient for many projects.
If your project is well-served by wiki documentation, then you
need read no further.

But fossil also supports embedding project documentation as
files in the source tree. There are several potential advantages
to this approach:

The documentation files are versioned together with the
source code files so it is always clear what version of
the documentation goes with a particular release.

The documentation files can be edited using your favorite
text editor instead of having to use the web-based wiki
editor.

Only people with check-in privileges can modify the documentation.
(This might be either an advantage or disadvantage, depending
on the nature of your project.)

We will call documentation that is included as files in the source tree
"embedded documentation".

Fossil Support For Embedded Documentation

The fossil web interface supports embedded documentation using
the "/doc" page. To access embedded documentation, one points
a web browser to a fossil URL of the following form:

<baseurl>/doc/<version>/<filename>

The <baseurl> is the main URL used to access the fossil web server.
For example, the <baseurl> for the fossil project itself is
either http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil or
http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/fossil.
If you launch the web server using the "fossil server" command line,
then the <baseurl> is usually
http://localhost:8080/.

The <version> is any unique prefix of the check-in ID for
the check-in containing the documentation you want to access.
Or <version> can be the name of a
branch in order to show
the documentation for the latest version of that branch.
Or <version> can be one of the keywords "tip" or
"ckout". The "tip" keyword means to use the most recent
check-in. This is useful if you want to see the very latest
version of the documentation. The "ckout" keywords means to
pull the documentation file from the local source tree on disk, not
from the any check-in. The "ckout" keyword normally
only works when you start your server using the "fossil server"
or "fossil ui"
command line and is intended to show what the documentation you are currently
editing looks like before you check it in.

Finally, the <filename> element of the URL is the
pathname of the documentation file relative to the root of the source
tree.

The mimetype (and thus the rendering) of documentation files is
determined by the file suffix. Fossil currently understands
many different file suffixes,
including all the popular ones such as ".css", ".gif", ".htm",
".html", ".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png", and ".txt".

Documentation files whose names end in ".wiki" use the
fossil wiki markup -
a safe subset of HTML together with some wiki rules for paragraph
breaks, lists, and hyperlinks.
Documentation files ending in ".md" or ".markdown" use the
Markdown markup language.
Documentation files ending in ".txt" are plain text.
Wiki, markdown, and plain text documentation files
are rendered with the standard fossil header and footer added.
Most other mimetypes are delivered directly to the requesting
web browser without interpretation, additions, or changes.

Files with the mimetype "text/html" (the .html or .htm suffix) are
usually rendered directly to the browser without interpretation.
However, if the file begins with a <div> element like this:

<div class='fossil-doc' data-title='Title Text'>

Then the standard Fossil header and footer are added to the document
prior to being displayed. The "class='fossil-doc'" attribute is
required for this to occur. The "data-title='...'" attribute is
optional, but if it is present the text will become the title displayed
in the Fossil header. An example of this can be seen in the text
of the Index Of Fossil Documentation
document.

Examples

This file that you are currently reading is an example of
embedded documentation. The name of this file in the fossil
source tree is "www/embeddeddoc.wiki".
You are perhaps looking at this
file using the URL:

The first part of this path, the "http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html",
is the base URL. You might have originally typed:
http://www.fossil-scm.org/. The web server at the www.fossil-scm.org
site automatically redirects such links by appending "index.html". The
"index.html" file on www.fossil-scm.org is really a CGI script
(do not be mislead by the name) which runs the fossil web service in
CGI mode. The "index.html" CGI script looks like this:

The "/trunk/" part of the URL tells fossil to use
the documentation files from the most recent trunk check-in.
If you wanted to see an historical version of this document,
you could substitute the name of a check-in for "/trunk/".
For example, to see the version of this document associated with
check-in [9be1b00392], simply replace the "/trunk/" with
"/9be1b00392/". You can also substitute the symbolic name
for a particular version or branch. For example, you might
replace "/trunk/" with "/experimental/" to get the latest
version of this document in the "experimental" branch. The symbolic name
can also be a date and time string in any of the following formats:

YYYY-MM-DD

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS

When the symbolic name is a date and time, fossil shows the version
of the document that was most recently checked in as of the date
and time specified. So, for example, to see what the fossil website
looked like at the beginning of 2010, enter:

The file that encodes this document is stored in the fossil source tree under
the name "www/embeddeddoc.wiki" and so that name forms the
last part of the URL for this document.

As I sit writing this documentation file, I am testing my work by
running the "fossil ui" command line and viewing
http://localhost:8080/doc/ckout/www/embeddeddoc.wiki in
Firefox. I am doing this even though I have not yet checked in
the "www/embeddeddoc.wiki" file for the first time. Using
the special "ckout" version identifier on the "/doc" page
it is easy to make multiple changes to multiple files and see how they all
look together before committing anything to the repository.

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